Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art最新文献

{"title":"Iconomy: Towards a Political Economy of Images","authors":"Giles Fielke","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2023.2222384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2023.2222384","url":null,"abstract":"ed as ‘videodeath’, Smith wends his way only partly towards the images of executions for dissemination via video, like those used by Islamic terror organisations to shock and instil fear in their audience-enemies. The 17-year-old woman who filmed the police killing of Floyd, for nine unflinching minutes, was perhaps unwittingly participating in the structure of our spectacle culture that not only incites but in some sense always produces more violence. George Holliday, who used his Handycam to video LAPD officers beating Rodney King in 1991, and who died of COVID-19 on 21 September 2021, was in some ways responsible—or perhaps more pointedly, the video camcorder he used was responsible— for the 63 deaths that followed the trial of the officers, in the rioting that occurred when they were acquitted of wrongdoing in their arrest of King. (King himself died tragically in 2012 at age 47 after years of addiction and violence following the 1991 event that made him a globally famous victim of police brutality.) Yet even as Smith considers these possibilities (113–17), he skirts the existing arguments about media and violence already made so well by contemporary commentators such as Groys (‘we all know bin Laden as a video artist first and foremost’), in preference for the vague idea of ambient images as the more suitable vector for establishing the effectiveness of these recorded killings within the iconomy. The reader is left asking: why? This incongruence leads to a question that Smith seems reluctant to ask: what is it that mediates what he has gathered here in the section titled ‘Iconoclash’? As the central part of the text, there remains a very demanding debate to be had about the so-called ‘image-complex’ attributed to Meg McLagan and Yates McKee (61)—one that recapitulates the arguments against the medieval bans on the use of images made by the iconophile Nikephoros (via Mondzain’s thesis arguing for its contemporary significance). Is the answer to the question of iconoclash too much for Smith to bear? When the French philosopher Alain Badiou intervened into this question of the clash of contemporary images in a lecture from 2013 titled ‘Images of the Present Time’ (translated and published as The Pornographic Age), he argued, typically provocative, that ‘the emblem of the present age, its fetish, which covers with a false image naked power without image, is the word “democracy”’. What we have in reality is the unsolicited distribution of images by market-based, algorithmic, and visual regimes. In revealing the political contents Smith is aiming at, the anarchic solution that appears seems too difficult to fathom. Enter Donald Trump, the eventually successful presidential candidate announcing his campaign in 2015, initially as an independent, and initially distinct from the GOP. Trump’s interest in, and most often successful interventions into the media-sphere as a montage of attractions is closer to Soviet-style propaganda than the d eclass e li","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":"23 1","pages":"111 - 118"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46218375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"VNS Matrix-Pilled: Three Propositions for Revisiting 1990s Cyberfeminist Art Now","authors":"C. Hurst","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2023.2214588","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2023.2214588","url":null,"abstract":"Cultural studies scholar Jeremy Gilbert has argued for analysis of ‘the long 1990s’—a post-End of History period of technological advancement, cultural stagnation, and increasingly entrenched neoliberalism. According to Gilbert, the long 1990s are now—hopefully—over. This article argues that the Australian cyberfeminist artists VNS Matrix are, like the decade, overdue for comprehensive critical reassessment. As a starting point for this project, I set out three propositions for considering VNS Matrix’s artworks in light of current discourses at the intersection of art, technology, and feminism. Firstly, VNS Matrix wanted to abolish the family computer (meaning change the patriarchal structures of emotional attachment that shaped how women and queer people approached new technology). Secondly, VNS Matrix’s playful exploration of queer cyborgian sexuality pre-empted the ways in which sex, gender, and technology have become entwined in our ‘pharmacopornographic’ age, to quote Paul Preciado. Thirdly, decolonial critiques of art history mean that a technomaterialist approach is crucial for analysis of net art works; all that is digital begins in the physical. In the case of VNS Matrix, this framework means situating digital artworks in relation to the land that underpinned their genesis—Tartanya/Adelaide.","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":"23 1","pages":"43 - 60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47528337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Choreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s–1970s","authors":"Susan Best","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2023.2222390","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2023.2222390","url":null,"abstract":"As the title indicates, Erin Brannigan’s new book Choreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s–1970s is a history of the relationship between dance and the visual arts across three decades. Typically, this relationship has been presented as dance following trends in the visual arts. For example, American dance practitioner Yvonne Rainer is frequently classified as a minimalist; the assumption being that she followed the precepts of the visual arts movement, minimalism. Rainer, of course, contributed to this way of thinking about her work through her much-cited essay of 1968 ‘A Quasi Survey of Some “Minimalist” Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A’. Brannigan’s book is a radical repositioning of dance discourse and practice, proposing that dance is central to the changes that took place in the visual art scene of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s in the United States. In other words, she very convincingly reverses the art historical assumption that the visual arts were in the lead of major artistic innovations, with dance simply following in its wake. I was surprised to find that some of the evidence for the importance of dance is already in the art historical literature but strangely has not been properly acknowledged or digested. For example, Brannigan cites prominent art historian Thomas Crow on this issue. In his book The Rise of the Sixties (1996), he provides a list of visual art borrowings from the dance style of Judson Church: ‘serial repetition, equality of parts, anonymous surfaces, suspicion of self-aggrandizing emotion’. These and other de-subjectifying impulses of the 1960s and ’70s are often used to characterise minimalism in the visual arts. Brannigan demonstrates that they are inventions of dance in the first instance. For example, amplifying Crow’s point about the suspicion of emotion, Brannigan examines in depth how choreographer Anna Halprin pioneers the inexpressive task-based work that is such a strong feature of visual arts in this period. In this vein, I was particularly struck by the revelation that the famous adage of minimalist artist Donald Judd to describe a mundane approach to composition, ‘one thing after another’, from 1965, is preceded by dancer and choreographer Simone Forti’s ‘one thing followed another’ from 1960. And that the box form, which is so important for minimalist Robert Morris’s sculpture, begins when he makes dance props for Forti. Moreover, the book makes a major contribution to dance literature of this period, which has tended to focus on the Judson Dance Theater as the key point","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":"23 1","pages":"119 - 124"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47486480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Personal Tributes delivered at ‘Celebrating Emeritus Professor Virginia Spate AC FAHA, 1937–2002’, University of Sydney, 10 November 2022","authors":"Mark Ledbury, Terry Smith, Janet Laurence, M. Roberts, Chiara O’Reilly","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2023.2225258","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2023.2225258","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":"23 1","pages":"125 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44553613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Rescue of William D'Oyly: Colonial Castaway Encounters and the Imperial Gaze","authors":"L. Chandler","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2023.2212005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2023.2212005","url":null,"abstract":"Castaways and Cross-Cultural Interactions Prominent British maritime artist John Wilson Carmichael’s (1799–1868) two paintings, The Rescue of William D’Oyly, by the Isabella, from Murray Island, Torres Strait, 1836 (1839, fig. 1), and The Rescue of William D’Oyly (1841, fig. 2), depict a dramatic and once widely known episode in colonial Australian history. In 1834, whilst en route from Sydney to India, the barque Charles Eaton was destroyed in rough seas on a reef near the eastern tip of Cape York in northern Australia. It was unknown if there were survivors, although contradictory reports suggested that there might yet be hope. Almost two years later, in June 1836, the Government Schooner Isabella arrived at Mer (Murray Island) where Captain Lewis and his crew found two of the survivors, William D’Oyly (aged four) and John Ireland (aged seventeen), who were living with the Meriam people. Struggling to recall English, Ireland related his memories of events that ensued following the Charles Eaton’s demise, including the killing of all the adult survivors and John and William’s subsequent adoption into a Meriam family. John Ireland’s tale, which encompassed violence that fed colonial fears, as well as expressions of great compassion involving the adoption and care of the boys, captured public attention in Australia and abroad. Written accounts of the shipwreck and its aftermath included Ireland’s testimony (published as a children’s book), reports from rescue ship personnel, newspaper articles, pamphlets and other publications. There do not appear to be any publicly available paintings of the event apart from those by Carmichael, which are examined here. Like the written accounts, Carmichael’s works envisaged these encounters from a European worldview, and there is little documentary material revealing Islander perspectives of the events, although some information is conveyed through the European accounts, albeit in a mediated way. The artworks dramatically depict","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":"23 1","pages":"96 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43863113","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Risky Business: Ivan Durrant Versus the National Gallery of Victoria","authors":"Christopher R. Marshall","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2023.2215830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2023.2215830","url":null,"abstract":"Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size AcknowledgementsAn early version of the article was presented at the AAANZ 2022 Conference for the session ‘Museums and Risk’. I would like to thank the other participants for their contributions as well as the anonymous readers for their most helpful suggestions. Thanks are also due to David Hurlston and to Ivan Durrant for generously responding to my questions.Notes1 For the historical significance of the Modern Masters exhibition, see Understanding Museums: Australian Museums and Museology (2011), ed. Des Griffin and Leon Paroissien, National Museum of Australia, https://nma.gov.au/research/understanding-museums/Issues_museology_introduction.html; especially Daniel Thomas, ‘Art Museums in Australia: A Personal Account’, https://nma.gov.au/research/understanding-museums/DThomas_2011.html; and Caroline Turner, ‘International Exhibitions’, https://nma.gov.au/research/understanding-museums/CTurner_2011.html; Joanna Mendelssohn, Catherine de Lorenzo, Alison Inglis and Catherine Speck, Australian Art Exhibitions: Opening Our Eyes (Melbourne: Thames and Hudson, 2018), 95.2 ‘Notes for the Prime Minister for the opening of the exhibition, Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 9 April 1975’, available at https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/original/00003691.pdf3 For the Australian Government’s role in indemnifying international loan exhibitions, see Jim Berryman, ‘Art and National Interest: The Diplomatic Origins of the “Blockbuster Exhibition” in Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies 37, no. 2 (2013): 163–66.4 For the Whitlam Government’s arts policy, see ibid., 163–64; and Mendelssohn et al., Australian Art Exhibitions, 46–52. For the 1973 acquisition of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, see Lindsay Barrett, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of the Metropolitan Dailies’, in The Prime Minister’s Christmas Card: ‘Blue Poles’ and Cultural Politics in the Whitlam Era (Sydney: Power Publications, 2001), 13–44; and Terry Smith, ‘Putting Painting at Stake: Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles’, in Jackson Pollock’s ‘Blue Poles’, ed. Anthony White, exhibition catalogue (Canberra: The National Gallery of Australia, 2002), 59–62.5 Maureen Gilchrist, ‘Great Day in Our History of Art’, The Age, Tuesday 27 May 1975; no author, ‘The Night the Modern Masters Came to Melbourne’, The Herald, May 27, 1975.6 Ibid.7 ‘And the Queue just goes on … and on … and on …’, The Herald, June 21, 1975.8 Greg McKenzie, ‘I’ll Kill the Cow on the Stage: Artist’, The Sun, May 25, 1975.9 ‘MONASH COW, TX 28/5/75, EX FILM NTV1639, 1.58’, ABC Research Archives; ‘Monash University Cancels Ivan Durrant Happening Planned for Alexander Theatre’, ABC Research Archives.10 A version of the footage is available online. The description reads: ‘Unedited version cow being slaughtered in paddock (actual shooting not included on ‘Current Affair’) cow being dumped on steps’. ‘Australia: Cow Killing an A","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135799866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dispersed Subjects","authors":"James Nguyen","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2023.2216745","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2023.2216745","url":null,"abstract":"For more than five years, I have been working with collaborator Victoria Pham on a project titled Re:Sounding. As artist-researchers, our work continues to bring together collaborators, organisations, and very different communities to reinvigorate, reclaim, and rematriate the sounds and musical culture of instruments held in museum and private collections. Our work began with the Dông Sơn drums, a group of Bronze Age instruments that were primarily excavated from the Red River Delta in the north of Vietnam during French occupation and collected from various tribes and cultures throughout Southeast Asia. As the children of boat people, Victoria and I regularly heard stories about these mythical bronze drums. Instead of focusing on the traumas of the war, our families told us stories about fantastical instruments that carried the sound of thunder from the ancient times of the Da: i Viê: t, ancestors to the Vietnamese Kinh majority three thousand years ago. These drums could summon thunderstorms and lightning, simultaneously bringing harvest rains and releasing wild torrents capable of washing away enemy invaders. Despite these stories, our parents had only ever seen archaeological and ethnographic photographs of Dông Sơn drums in old schoolbooks. In the aftermath of decolonial ruptures during the 1950s and 1960s, these drums had by then been largely looted or systematically ‘rescued’ for ethnographic and scientific study elsewhere. It was not until 2016, whilst visiting me during a funded travelling fellowship (from the Samstag Museum of Art and the University of South Australia) that my parents had their first encounter with a Dông Sơn drum. As tourists marking off the must dos of New York City, we happened on a small example of this mythical drum, displayed in the Florence and Herbert Irving Southeast Asian Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My parents were unlikely to be motivated enough to visit similar museums back in Australia, but in this instance, visiting me during my arts research residency, they were willing to participate in popular high art and culture. Spot lit and arranged alongside other Bronze Age artefacts, this Dông Sơn drum was silently displayed behind thick museum glass. Contradicting the","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":"23 1","pages":"23 - 42"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46521020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Procaccini and the Business of Painting in Early Modern Milan","authors":"S. Albl","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2022.2143766","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2022.2143766","url":null,"abstract":"The novelty of Angelo Lo Conte’s book lies in its approach to the study of the Procaccini brothers’ careers which are analysed for the very first time through a socio-economic framework, interconnecting Camillo (1551-1629), Carlo Antonio (1555-1630) and Giulio Cesare’s (1574-1625) individual stories and understanding their success as the combination of family strategy, workshop practice and business organisation. The book investigates the practical reasons that prompted the Procaccini to leave Bologna between the end of 1587 and beginning of 1588 and relocate to Milan as well as the strategies enacted by the family members to settle in the new city. In doing so, the volume moves away from a focus on the individual brothers (especially Giulio Cesare, the most talented and widely collected artist of the three brothers) that appear in previous studies on the Procaccini and encloses Camillo, Carlo Antonio, and Giulio Cesare’s careers in a narrative that emphasises their achievements as painters and entrepreneurs. Such an approach allows for an investigation of the choices made by the Procaccini brothers at different times in their careers, the commissions they received, as well as the structure and the geographic focus they assigned to their family workshop. While art historical studies informed by a socio-economic approach have been devoted to cities such as Rome, Venice, Florence, Naples, Bologna, this has never been done for Milan. This fact alone reveals the ambitious, bold and innovative approach chosen by the author. The book is divided into six chapters. Chapter One “Old and New Approaches to the Procaccini” gives full credit to Carlo Cesare Malvasia who provides in his Felsina Pittrice (1678) the most complete source on the lives of the Procaccini brothers. Malvasia visited Milan in 1667 where he learned about the Procaccini from Ercole the Younger, Carlo Antonio’s son and the only remaining member of this dynasty of painters. Malvasia’s account on the Procaccini, as pointed out by Lo Conte, is an essay on a family story (p. 15). Before focusing on their individual achievements, Malvasia speaks about the connections between the brothers and states that the family members mutually agreed to leave Bologna. Malvasia also includes several excerpts from treatises written by seventeenth-century authors, such as Francesco Scanelli, Raffaello Soprani, Marco Boschini and Giambattista Marino, that document the fame and status the artists had gained during their lifetimes. Lo Conte draws attention to Girolamo Borsieri’s comments about Giulio Cesare’s excellence in sculpture and his stylistic closeness to Parmigianino as well Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 2022, vol. 22, no. 2, 234–236 https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2022.2143766","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":"22 1","pages":"234 - 236"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47428457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Teaching Mana Wāhine in Art History: He Whakaaro noa iho/Some Thoughts","authors":"Ngarino Ellis","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2022.2143759","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2022.2143759","url":null,"abstract":"Art history courses have the capacity and responsibility to engage students with materials, ideas, frameworks, and people to help them understand the multi-vocal and diverse world in which we all now live. The days of the ‘ sage on the stage ’ style of lecturing was never inspiring, instead reinforcing a generations-old power dynamic. This created silence and passivity on the part of students, and often reflected the world outside the classroom, where the perspectives of Indigenous women were often belittled and sidelined. Many art history curricula have been interrogated over the past twenty years, as part of a wider questioning of the canon — and the discipline. Globally, many teachers have pivoted their pedagogy towards a more nuanced and, frankly, more interesting way of teaching, quite apart from the material which they cover in their courses. At the University of Auckland, the discipline of art history has offered a diverse range of courses for many years, due in no small part to the broad range of lecturers. We are (remarkably in 2022) the only art history department that has one full-time permanent M (cid:1) aori teacher and one Pasifika. This has shaped the offerings to encompass M (cid:1) aori and Pacific material, from stage one through to Honours and PhD supervisions. Due to our modest number of FTEs (four), we only offer one course on gender specifically, though gender is an important aspect of other courses, from the Renaissance through to contempor-ary practice. This short article focuses on four key aspects of a stage two and three course, ‘ Gender, Ethnicity and Visual Culture ’ . The goal here is to shed light on how the course is shaped, in an effort to encourage other teachers to broaden not only their content but also, and equally important, the way in which the material is pre-sented. Teaching from a te ao M (cid:1) aori (M (cid:1) aori worldview) perspective","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":"22 1","pages":"187 - 192"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42386197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Doing Feminism: Women’s Art and Feminist Criticism in Australia","authors":"C. Hurst","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2022.2143761","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2022.2143761","url":null,"abstract":"Doing Feminism: Women’s Art and Feminist Criticism in Australia (2021) is Anne Marsh’s ambitious national survey of art and writing about and alongside feminism. The book begins with the 1960s pre-rumblings of the second wave and ends in the 2010s—bypassing the first half of the twentieth century in favour of the extended period when feminism as a concerted theoretical, political and artistic project has been most impactful in Australia. The publication is comprehensive, featuring over 220 artists, and is lavishly illustrated, with hundreds of colour plates filling its glossy pages. If read as a politically chic coffee table book, Doing Feminism excels. It has a stylish, large-format design with a distinctive highlighteryellow cover. Rather than slowly working through dense theory, readers can flick open to short (around 300 word) essays and enough feminist artworks to animate a thousand consciousness-raising circles. As a scholarly resource, the book is valuable—it will serve as a good starting point for finding under-researched artists and as a handy compendium of key Australian feminist art texts, many of which are difficult to locate online. However, Doing Feminism has limitations. It suffers from a meagre offering of critical feminist texts from the past two decades. More significantly, the book relies heavily on a framework of the “avant-garde”, which, to this reviewer, was a methodological distraction from the central project at hand. Try as one may to distance or repurpose the term away from European modernism, avant-garde is inseparable from its theoretical origins. The term struggles in the context of a twenty first century Australian artworld attempting to decolonise. Doing Feminism already had to contend with the unwieldy categories of ‘Australian’, ‘women’s art’ and ‘feminist criticism’. Did the book really need the added challenge of avant-garde? Doing Feminism could be seen as a monograph bookending the Australian era of the feminist blockbuster exhibition. Hilary Robinson identified this international trend of large-scale multi-artist museum shows dedicated to relations between art and feminism beginning around 2005. Notable examples were WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: 45 Years of Art and Feminism (2007) at Bilbao Fine Arts Museum and elles@centrepompidou (2009) in Paris. In Australia, Susan Best tracked a continuation of the trend with Contemporary Australia: Women (2012) at QAGOMA. The trend continued with Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism (2017-18) at ACCA, Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, Part","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":"22 1","pages":"218 - 223"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49165863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}